101–110 of 283 posts
State sponsored cyber warfare is something that happens at a scale that normal private companies and organizations are not well equipped to deal with. I wonder if there's someone you can alert in the government who can consider coordinating a counterattack or pass a backchannel note to the right people to cut it out.
Sitting down and writing a blog-post seems a pretty laid back reaction to $30k/day in Amazon bills... First thing I'd have done is take the site offline and call the various DDoS mitigation services (Incapsula, Cloudflare, etc.). Pretty surely most of them would gladly pick up the slack here, given the free PR (possibly even in mainstream press) they get in return.
(full disclosure: I do devops for one of the Russian sites that is currently mirrored by Collateral Freedom)
Move to OVH -- they offer free DDoS protection as standard, and unlimited bandwidth. I just moved to OVH after getting DDoSed. I'm paying $109/month for a quad core 3.7Ghz Xeon, 64GB RAM, dual 2TB software RAID. It's a pretty sweet deal, and I haven't had any problems so far.
- Use memcached+nginx to load the drupal content instead of calling up PHP each request (PHP saves the page in memcached, nginx reads it from there).
- put it all behind CloudFlare
This works for Wordpress too.
This is interesting. Though Hacker News appears to not be blocked, it has been flagged as "Contradictory" on certain days. Is the Chinese government blocking certain news items? Take a look here: https://en.greatfire.org/news.ycombinator.com
If you click on the day in the calendar to look at the details, the "Contradictory" status is when some of their test servers work and others don't. For this site in particular, there are several servers showing a timeout and no data received. So it's possible that HN is being partially blocked.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive my outburst, and maybe this sentiment won't be well received given the context, but I just find it to be downright unpatriotic for a US company like CloudFlare to stand there saying things like what Matt Prince says in your quote, when someone comes under attack by an opposing nation state. Again, I realize this place isn't exactly a bastion for this kind of sentiment, but have some thought for freedom here,…
Thanks for the feedback. In the case of Lantern, they were taking advantage of a bug in our system. Specifically, they were setting the SNI field (outside the encrypted packet) of a request to look like it was going to an actual CloudFlare customer (e.g., news.ycombinator.com) and then setting the host header inside the encrypted request to point to some restricted site. The bug was that we did not check that the SNI…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forgive my outburst, and maybe this sentiment won't be well received given the context, but I just find it to be downright unpatriotic for a US company like CloudFlare to stand there saying things like what Matt Prince says in your quote, when someone comes under attack by an opposing nation state. Again, I realize this place isn't exactly a bastion for this kind of sentiment, but have some thought for freedom here,…
Thanks for the feedback. In the case of Lantern, they were taking advantage of a bug in our system. Specifically, they were setting the SNI field (outside the encrypted packet) of a request to look like it was going to an actual CloudFlare customer (e.g., news.ycombinator.com) and then setting the host header inside the encrypted request to point to some restricted site. The bug was that we did not check that the SNI…
This makes a world of difference.
Just to confirm, does this mean that if the exact same attack had happened, but Lantern had been a CloudFlare customer, you wouldn't have shut them down?
Contact Akamai who recently bought the DDOS mitigation service Prolexic. They may be able to mitigate the attack and save you bandwidth costs. Alternatively, call CloudFlare. Don't just absorb this through Amazon.
CloudFlare is probably not a good choice. They recently blocked access to a similar service, Lantern, per the linked WSJ article. "CloudFlare, which offers content-delivery network services, said last week it cut off Lantern’s use of the service, saying it was unauthorized. “We don’t do anything to thwart the content restrictions in China or other countries,” said Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare. “We’re…
Response from CloudFlare's CEO here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9234367
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you mean 64GB of RAM.
To be exact, he probably means 64 GiB¹ of RAM (see IEEE 1541-2002²). ―――――― ¹ — http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%20GiB%20to%20MiB%20an... ² — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1541-2002
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "We don’t do anything to thwart the content restrictions in China or other countries," said Matthew Prince, chief executive of CloudFlare. "We’re a tech company and we comply with the law." There's a popular idea that businesses (and people) have no responsibilities to anyone but themselves, because what they have is theirs; they built it themselves. But if you think about it a little, it's obviously false. Here's…
That's an optimistic view. My take on it is "market share|revenue > human rights". EDIT: It turns out Lantern was using an exploit at Cloudflare [+], and wasn't a customer. My apologies /u/eastdakota. [+] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9234367